Preliminary Programme

Wed 11 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 12 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.00 - 18.30

Fri 13 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 14 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

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Wednesday 11 April 2012 11.00 - 13.00
M-2 WOR01 Natives as Missionaries
Main Building: Melville
Networks: Religion , World History Chair: David Lindenfeld
Organizer: David Lindenfeld Discussant: David Lindenfeld
Jin-heon Jung : Korean Protestant Aspirations: Korean Mega-church Founders' Conversion Narratives
Through an examination of Korean mega-church founders’ conversion narratives, this article analyzes Korean Protestant aspirations that have promoted the explosive church growth in 1960s post-war South Korea. It is in this time period that Korean churches were completely devolved from foreign to native Korean hands, and that the new key ... (Show more)
Through an examination of Korean mega-church founders’ conversion narratives, this article analyzes Korean Protestant aspirations that have promoted the explosive church growth in 1960s post-war South Korea. It is in this time period that Korean churches were completely devolved from foreign to native Korean hands, and that the new key characteristics of Korean churches emerged in the context of anticommunist nation-state building. In this light, this article explores the processes by which some charismatic leaders laid a cornerstone of current mega-churches in the 1960s in comparison with earlier pioneers (i.e., American missionaries and first generation Korean Protestant leaders in the early 20th century).
Korean Protestantism shows an extraordinary growth especially in the last decades, taking root in the time when American missionaries first sowed the seed in the late 19th century. To understand the success and characteristics of Korean Christianity, so far scholarly circles have focused on the affinity between Korean traditional religious culture (shamanism) and Protestant Christianity; the Church’s role as an agent of democratization and modernization in South Korea; gender matters (i.e., women’s devotion in church activities); and historical studies regarding nationalism and modernity before or during the Japanese colonial period.
Drawing on this previous literature, my research pays particular attention to the founders of mega-churches with focus on their narratives and ritual forms which I approach in comparative perspective. It is worth noting that while in most non-western countries Protestantism was equivalent to imperialism, Koreans did not consider American missionaries as imperialists, but as models of modernity. Throughout Japanese colonial period (1910-1945), churches and schools which the American missionaries established and ran served to raise Korean Protestant nationalists who pioneered in envisioning a new independent nation. These founding traditions are crucial to understand further stories of success in Korean Protestantism. But I would like to explore whether or how these traditions were continued, reconstructed, or reinterpreted through people’s narratives. In respect to a uniqueness of Christian tradition in which linguistic ritual (i.e., sermons, conversion narratives, and therefore Words) is essential, I shed light on Korean mega-church founders’ conversion narratives in relation to the church growth. I believe that their narratives formed Korean theologies and also constituted what “sincere” Korean Protestants should look like in the context of rapid industrialization and urbanization under militant dictatorship. (Show less)

Ulrike Kirchberger : The Pupils of Eleazar Wheelock's "Indian Charity School" as Native Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
Eleazar Wheelock, an important protagonist of the Great Awakening in New England, founded a school for the co-education of European and Native American children in Lebanon (Connecticut) in the 1750s. The aim was to "civilize" a certain number of Native American boys and girls, convert them to Protestantism, and, after ... (Show more)
Eleazar Wheelock, an important protagonist of the Great Awakening in New England, founded a school for the co-education of European and Native American children in Lebanon (Connecticut) in the 1750s. The aim was to "civilize" a certain number of Native American boys and girls, convert them to Protestantism, and, after this task was completed, to send them back to their own people. There they were supposed to work as missionaries, schoolteachers or as assistants to European missionaries. Some of Wheelock's pupils were sent out as married couples so that they could serve as models for a Christian family life within their communities. When Wheelock moved his school from Lebanon to Hanover (New Hampshire) in 1770, he had taught 67 Native American children.
His most famous pupil was the Mohegan Samson Occom. An ordained clergyman, Occom worked as a missionary among the Oneida, before Wheelock send him on a spectacular fundraising tour to Britain in 1765. There, Occom's sermons attracted large audiences. As a "civilized savage", he became a prominent personality in the Atlantic world. In the 1770s, he founded the settlement "Brothertown", where Christianized Native Americans should live out of the reach of European authority.
Whereas Occom's activities, his Protestant belief and the conflicts he suffered from as a result of his ethnic background are well researched, the biographies of Wheelock's other students have received little attention so far. Next to Occom, there were a number of other prominent figures. Some of them also crossed the Atlantic, like, for example, the Mohawk-leader Joseph Brant who demonstrated his loyalty to British Protestantism in several wars. Other lesser-known pupils worked as schoolteachers and missionaries among the Iroquois. Some students, girls in particular, had severe integration problems after having left Wheelock's school. The letters they wrote to their former teacher show how disorientated they often were, not belonging to their old community any more and being outsiders in European society at the same time.
The paper will deal with the role these "native missionaries" played both in the transatlantic networks of Protestantism and in their ethnic communities. Were they important figures who helped to spread Protestantism among the "heathen", did they contribute to fractionalization within Native American tribal formations, or were they by-standers without much influence in a time when nativists and the prophets of the pan-Indian movement gained more and more power among the Native Americans on the East coast? Was it possible for cosmopolitan personalities like Samson Occom to climb the social ladder and to create a specific form of indigenous Christianity or were the "educated Indians" instruments that accelerated the integration of the Native Americans into the pauper classes of an expanding European colonial society in the second half of the eighteenth century? Did the "native missionaries" really bring two different cultures together, thus contributing to a growing globalization and connectedness of the world, or were they victims of European cultural expansionism whose identities were crushed between different cultures? (Show less)

Xiaojing Wang : “For the Salvation of Our Fellow Men”: A Study of the Chinese Home Missionary Society (1918-1948)
The Chinese Home Missionary Society [CHMS] was established in 1918, and aimed to spread Christian faith to remote and “unevangelised” areas in China. Considered to be the first nationwide Christian movement launched by Chinese Christians, directed by Chinese brains and supported by Chinese funds, the CHMS deserves exploration within ... (Show more)
The Chinese Home Missionary Society [CHMS] was established in 1918, and aimed to spread Christian faith to remote and “unevangelised” areas in China. Considered to be the first nationwide Christian movement launched by Chinese Christians, directed by Chinese brains and supported by Chinese funds, the CHMS deserves exploration within the context of the study of Christianity in China, for it was Western missionaries that had played the main role in the advocacy of Christianity in China before the twentieth century. The CHMS and its missionary activities demonstrated not only an evangelistic zeal among native Christians, but also a growing consciousness of the “self-hood” of the Chinese Church. Referring to the “Three-self” Principle (Self-governing, Self-supporting and Self-propagating) of native church planting, self-propagation of a church meant one step forward towards church independence and maturity. Additionally, a non-denominational feature, which was embodied in the organisation and evangelistic movements of the CHMS, indicated an important factor of church indigeneity in China. This paper, therefore, aims to examine the historical accounts of the CHMS, including its origin, nature and missionary activities, in order to explore its role in the development of Christianity in China and its contribution to church indigeneity in early twentieth-century China. (Show less)

Emma Wild-Wood : Powerful Words: Revd Apolo Kivebulaya, a Broker of Social and Intellectual Change (1895-1933)
The agency of African Christians in religious change is increasingly accepted, but what accompanied a spiritual redirection? This paper will examine the diary of one Ganda evangelist as evidence for his intellectual engagement with CMS missionary and Ganda perceptions of social change. It will also suggest ways in which his ... (Show more)
The agency of African Christians in religious change is increasingly accepted, but what accompanied a spiritual redirection? This paper will examine the diary of one Ganda evangelist as evidence for his intellectual engagement with CMS missionary and Ganda perceptions of social change. It will also suggest ways in which his missionary interaction with peoples east of the Semeliki River may have challenged some of those perceptions. Whilst the paper focuses on the writings of one individual it examines his place in the changes taking place in expanding Anglican church in east-central Africa from the end of the nineteenth century. (Show less)



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